JBoss Sharpens SOA Tools

The vendor has announced the addition of the Drools open source business rules engine project to the JBoss platform and the release of JBoss jBPM 3.0.

JBoss Inc. Tuesday announced its strategy to make its JEMS the industrys interoperable, open-source platform for SOA.
Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management at Atlanta-based JBoss, said the company continues to extend JBoss Enterprise Middleware System with new and enhanced open source software designed to improve business agility.
JBoss announced the addition of the Drools open source business rules engine project to the JBoss platform and the release of JBoss jBPM 3.0 as two important parts of its service-oriented architecture strategy. JBoss made the announcements at its JBoss World Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain, this week.

Connolly said the JBoss Application Server already is used to host Web services and JBoss Portal and JBoss jBPM, the companys business process management solution, both support SOA implementations.

Meanwhile, the incorporation of Drools adds dynamic processing and intelligent routing of business processes based on service level agreements or other business rules, he said.
Connolly said the arrival of JBoss Messaging early next year will enhance the SOA capabilities of the JEMS platform. Indeed, JBoss Messaging will be the backbone of the companys JBoss Enterprise Service Bus, which will be available later in 2006, Connolly said.
In addition, Mark Proctor, the lead developer on the Drools project, has joined JBoss as a software architect, while the projects founder, Bob McWhirter, will serve as a consultant on integration of the Drools business rules engine into JEMS, Connolly said.

Click here to read about JBoss and Microsoft cooperating to promote interoperability.
In a statement, Proctor said: "Simply put, there is no other organization in open source as willing to take risks as JBoss when it comes to driving middleware innovation, crystallizing a vision for the enterprise and executing on it. But it was incredibly important that the Drools community be involved in the decision process to join JBoss. Weve seen what JBoss did for Hibernate, JBoss jBPM and Apache Tomcat and have every confidence that Drools will achieve similar success with dedicated resources from JBoss."
Meanwhile, JBoss jBPM 3.0 features simplified persistence, extended task management and a newly developed pluggable architecture. It also enables the development of automated business processes and workflows with its business process management foundation as well as the orchestration of business processes using the Business Process Execution Language.
"We feel its important to show JEMS as an interoperable platform of choice," Connolly said, noting that JEMS supports a wide variety of platform providers, interoperability with existing solutions, a large number of service providers and system integrators, and modularity and flexibility. Connolly noted the recent alliance between JBoss and Microsoft to enhance interoperability between the companies platforms as evidence of JBoss commitment to interoperability.
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Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.